Going Gaga

"Last year, Lady Gaga picked up a new tattoo. It's a quote from Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet... The quote Gaga chose from Rilke is about the need to write, a need that is akin to death. "In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?" That's a pretty serious sentiment to have tattooed on your own body...You can say that Lady Gaga is the newest next thing. I say that she is one with the ancients."

Morgan Meis, founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for The Believer, Harper’s, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant.

"Just a second; it's my favorite song they're gonna play and I cannot text you with a drink in my hand, eh? "

Lady Gaga, Telephone

Post-modernism has done a lot for our willingness to critically assess all forms of culture, and to assess them by their own standards, rather than those imported from "high-art". At times though, that open-mindedness leads not merely an expansion of critical judgement to popular culture, but to a complete suspension of artistic assessment when it comes to the next big thing.

Meis' essay makes a powerful, if largely unconscious, argument against the makeup of the Warhol foundation's selection committee, but seems much less willing to be drawn on the question of whether Lady Gaga's near-fatal drive to write has produced anything that's, well, any good. Because, as the next thousand or so words will demonstrate, either Gaga is keeping her best work under her impressive array of hats, or her compulsion to write is more a mechanical itch than a

creative one.

Because I suspect this:

"Just a second; it's my favorite song they're gonna play and I cannot text you with a drink in my hand, eh? "

is not what Rilke had in mind.

Now, I'm well aware that the lyrics to dance-wallpaper like Gaga's tend to be an afterthought, but this is a couple of revisions away from qualifying even as "tossed-off". If you're going to cover your body with reminders of how much you love writing, you'd better be capable of something more than just putting pen to paper. You'd better be capable of producing something that doesn't make Oasis' "slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball" sound like an intriguing, Lenonesque paradox by comparison.

What is it, exactly, about that couplet that makes it so terrible? Gaga opens with an inversion - "my favourite song they're going to play", rather than the more natural "they're going to play my favourite song". It's not a terrible inversion, as these things go, certainly not on the level of Joe Strummer's "into action, everybody sprang", but it's clearly been forced to fit the

rhyme scheme. An inversion like this is the lyricist's down-payment on the second half of the couplet, the payoff that justifies the somewhat awkward setup, like telling everyone that your wife is "going on holiday to the home of raggae", so you can pounce when they ask "Jamaica?".

So, what's Gaga's humdinger of a follow-up to "it's my favorite song they're gonna play"? How does she reward her listeners' tolerance?

"I cannot text you with a drink in my hand, eh?"

Two things Gaga. Two things.

One, "cannot", "eh"? I haven't been this disappointed with the failed payoff to a strained lyrical setup since T-pain expressed his excitement with the bar-based avail

ability of electronic fund transfer technology with "buy you a drank, I got money in the bank".

Two:

yes you fucking can, Gaga. Yes. You. Fucking. Can. Unless you're wearing some sort of lobster outfit, as I suppose might be the case, communication while holding a drink in a loud room is pretty much the fucking point of text messaging.

Not only are those two lines just awful, they do not logically follow from each other. If they are about to play your favourite song, presumably it is irrelevant whether or not you can text one-handed, like a human, because you will be dancing to your favourite song; unless it's one of yours, in which case you'll be standing, slack-jawed, marvelling at the banality of the lyrics.

Now, it's a rare pop song that can stand up to too much logical analysis, but Lady Gaga's paid a pretty horrendous price, lyrically speaking, to share with us her difficulties communicating (which, now that I think about it, is sort of ironic - I suspect the person calling her wasn't missing much by way of conversation) only to come up with two apparently randomly-selected observations about different troubles you can have with your phone in a nightclub.

When you're writing about the most workaday phenomena imaginable, you should at least be able to bring some spark of wit, some Pulp-like perceptiveness to the enterprise. It's as if I sat down to stave off my writing-cramps with a poem about brushing my teeth and came up with:

"Paste on my brush, water does spray

into the sink, toothbrushing Yay!"

If you're going to dial-down the degree of difficulty on your subject matter, you'd better be capable of at least one astute observation or, at a minimum, rhymes which don't rely on inverting one line and ending the next with "eh?".

So, it's a terrible lyric. Are there worse lyrics out there? Probably. There's the (sadly defunct) South Queensland Crushers' theme song for instance, the full text of which is as follows:

"Let me hear you say onya, onya, onya, onya,

Onya South Queensland Crushers (repeat)"

and which is, perhaps not surprisingly, preserved nowhere online. Now, that's a bad song, but one that's at least tuned correctly to the intellectual level of the institution (and, let's be honest, the region) it seeks to venerate. It's the work of a hack-for-hire pushed out into the creative wilderness of rugby league theme songs, and left to fend for himself after artists higher up the food chain have already picked the landscape clean of synonyms for aggression.

So, while the writer might have sported the odd tattoo, it was much more likely to be a heart that said "Mother" or a XXXX logo than a reminder of the physiological consequences of failure to write with sufficient frequency. The author, if pressed, would admit his work was awful and, probably, he'd blame the choice of subject matter forced on him by the commission.

“On my tour I’m going to be in my bubble dress on a piano made of bubbles, singing about love and art and the future."

Lady Gaga, interview with New York Magazine

"Hello, baby; you called

I can't hear a thing
I have got no service in the club you see, see"

Lady Gaga, Telephone

Lady Gaga, on the other hand, has chosen her present milieu - songs about the difficulty of obtaining mobile reception - freely. While she appears to understand that unlike, say, the South Queensland Crushers, love, art and the future are rich lyrical seams, she's chosen instead to mine the less obviously promising territory of a Nokia user's manual.

So while the promise of the bubble dress, and the bubble piano were delivered on just fine, we're still waiting for a clear lyrical statement outlining Lady Gaga's views on the future, other than an implied hope for improved signal quality in her night spots of choice.

And this gulf, between the accoutrements to her music and the music itself, is something of a pattern. Critics praise Gaga's film clips for referencing Lang and Tarrantino, without noting that the clips bear no relation to the songs themselves. Imprisonment, sex, murder and revenge are all pretty good subjects for a song, and they've inspired some fantastic ones over the years, but they are not reasonably seen as relating, even metaphorically, to the difficulty of conducting a telephone conversation when things are loud.

When Madonna, to whom Gaga is often compared, scandalised audiences with Like a Virgin and Like a Prayer, the shock value of the clips played to something thematically close to the shock value of the songs themselves. This is the challenge associated with making a film clip shocking, or otherwise artistically valuable. Not pasting together borrowed images like a film student with scissors and a scrapbook, but in some way integrating them into the overall experience of your music. This, and only this, is why we don't judge a film clip by the narrative standards of a short film - because it is intended to play off, and is therefore restricted by, the song it accompanies.

But what if, while voiding your morning urge to write, you have shat out a song so banal, so devoid of interest that no amount of money, no amount of silly hats, no amount of cribbing from the critic-approved canon can provide you with even a single arresting image? Do you, the artist, then have a licence to make an incoherent short film about something else entirely and call it a film clip? No. All this means is that you, the artist, have written a song which is too banal even for MTV. It means that you, the artist, have to start again, and if images of murder and prison excite you, as well they might, try writing the fucking song about them next time.

This is why fawning profiles of Lady Gaga devote so much time to the stuff near her music, to the giant fish in her stage show, to the proclamations of artistic integrity scratched into her body, to the unrelated pastiche of her clips and, most of all, to her fucking hats.

At the bottom of the fourth page of an eight page profile, New York Magazine slips this in:

"Gaga also throws in our face something we’ve known all along but numbly decided to ignore: American celebrities have become very, very boring. (The fact that she has done this at the same time that much of the actual music she makes herself is somewhat boring is another feat.)"

When I write my ironic dictionary entry for "burying the lede" I'll open with several paragraphs of irrelevant background and colour, and then, just when the reader is about to skip over the entry entirely, I'll point to that quote from New York Magazine. Because, in eight pages of serving largely as Lady Gaga's stenographer, we only once, half way through, hear that the musician being profiled sucks at making music. This, then, is the suspension of critical standards I complained of at the outset, and in its way it's much more offensive to pop music than the "I suppose they call it music"-sneering from the opera-lovers of yesteryear. Because, if you value an art form, the fact that one of its famous exponents does it really, really badly ought to at least rate a mention somewhere in the first half of your story.

I'm mostly pretty skeptical of dance music about dancing to music. It's like an edible plate, or a painting of a gallery wall - there's a frisson of metatextual excitement, but it's wrapped around a gigantic declaration of creative bankruptcy. Or, to put it another way, writing about music is famously like dancing about architecture, meaning, transitively, that music about dancing is like writing about architecture: fucking boring.

It is, though, possible to write a good song about dancing which is, itself, a good song to dance to. Frightened Rabbit wrote a whole concept album about dance floors and sex, a combination which interview-Gaga would admit just edges out dance floors and telephones in the artistic interest stakes. But when Frightened Rabbit write something like

"Well we can change our partners, this is a progressive dance,

But remember it was me who dragged you up to the sweaty floor."

They're employing what Rilke would call a "metaphor", so that the dancing stands for both itself and for something larger, something about, well, art, and love, and the future. So it is possible, but it's just not as easy as telling a journalist you're going to do it.

“What I’ve discovered,” said [Gaga], with a photo-ready tilt of her head, “is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth—and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.”

New York Magazine

"Cause I'm bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning
Just like a chick in the casino
Take your bank before I pay you out"

Lady Gaga, Poker Face

Careful readers will note that the above excerpt does, in fact, contain a lie: typically, in casino-run Texas hold 'em games, the love glue gun is deployed only when the river card is an ace and no player is bluffing with their muffin (although some home games will allow the dealer use of the love glue gun on any face card, regardless of the muffin-bluff).

This then, is Lady Gaga's experimenting with metaphor, and like her take on inversion it's a doozy. Rather than constructing a detailed image which is simultaneously about knowing what to do when you're, say, out of both literal and metaphorical aces, Gaga follows the "include some words having vaguely to do with card games" route:

"I wanna hold em' like they do in Texas Plays
Fold em' let em' hit me raise
Lovegame and intuition play the cards with Spades to start
And after he's been hooked I'll play the one that's on his heart"

Careful readers will once again note that Gaga has subtly deviated from traditional hold `em - or "Texas Plays" - rules. Typically, after a hold `em player has elected to "hit", he must then play hearts first, before requesting that the player to his left "go fish". Because, after all, if a tiny little lie causes us to fall in love, how much more potent must complete gibberish be?

"the difference between her and, say, Madonna, is that you don’t penetrate Gaga. Her songs and videos are – while sexual – about dysfunction and neuroses and alienation and self-discovery."

Caitlin Moran, The Times of London

"cause I'm out in the club
and I'm sipping that bubb"

Lady Gaga, Telephone

Let's be clear, Caitlin, while Lady Gaga's videos might be about all manner of things, for sufficiently small values of "about", the only dysfunction tackled in her actual songs, in the music she, a musician writes as part of her life-prolonging ritual, is patchy mobile phone reception. You might enjoy Gaga's instantly-dated, sub-autotune-the-news vocal stylings, you might rather like it when she borrows liberally from Ace-of-fucking-Bass but let's not pretend she's anything other than a guilty, stupid pleasure. Because if you actually learned anything about neurosis from, say, Bad Romance, then you may wish to pursue further studies by more conventional means, because you're starting from a very low base indeed.

"Uncle Joe is very nice,

He bought us both a chocolate ice"

Emma and Grandpa, Uncle Joe

"Got my flash on it's true,

need that picture of you"

Lady Gaga, Paparazzi

Like the gentleman in charge of selling us on the South Queensland Crushers, the writer behind Emma and Grandpa has a hell of a job - he's constrained by narrating the action on the screen and bound by the vocabulary familiar to five year-olds. The result is pretty awful doggerel, of which "very nice/chocolate ice" is but a representative example.

Lady Gaga, on the other hand, is creatively free, but, sadly, it's in the Bobby McGee sense of having absolutely nothing to lose. She'd clearly benefit from a strong, or even literate editorial hand when she writes, records and releases a line which conveys two pieces of information:

1) She has her flash on; and

2) Yes, she really does have her flash on.

Had the perspective character established a reputation as an unreliable narrator by that point in the song, the "it's true" might have added meaning, but that kind of depth is reserved for the songs interview-Gaga claims to have written.

So what ought our eight-page profiles of Lady Gaga to say? Well, they could draw attention to the yawning chasm between her pretensions and her production. They could stop treating her videos and performances as an alternative to her musical output. They should ask her whether it's not a bit wanky to tattoo yourself with a warning that a failure to churn out incoherent summaries of card games may lead to your premature death, and perhaps challenge her to put the theory to the test.

But since, as a headline, "Dance Musician Vapid" is a bit "Dog bites Man", we get sycophantic defences based on her borrowed images, expensive stage shows and her hats, her hats, her hats. And if that's her defenders' ultimate gambit, that she is as culturally significant as a woman with a truly astounding array of hats, I suppose we all, ultimately, agree.